


something lonesome

by stillmadaboutpetra



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Dopplers (The Witcher), M/M, Masturbation, Monsterfucking, Monsters, More dialogue than you're expecting, Other, Self-Esteem Issues, Selfcest, Touch-Starved Eskel (The Witcher), Witchers Have Feelings (The Witcher)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:34:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26608318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/pseuds/stillmadaboutpetra
Summary: Eskel meets a Doppler of himself.
Relationships: Eskel (The Witcher)/Original Character(s), Eskel (The Witcher)/Original Male Character(s), Eskel/Doppler, Eskel/Eskel, Eskel/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, implied
Comments: 21
Kudos: 119





	something lonesome

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EskelChopChop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EskelChopChop/gifts).



> Happy (early) birthday to Eskelchopchop who is just gosh darn brilliant. I'll not do his eskel justice but have some eskel in contemplation with his doppler self. **hand waves at lore and general nonsense because as usual I know nothing about anything**

* * *

  
The alderman gives him an unimpressed suspicious look when Eskel drops off the clawed feet of the adolescent wyvern that had been running amock, as is the only way these days for monsters and creatures to be running, and generally eating things as it saw fit, as any adolescent of any species is inclined to do. It'd been pityingly small compared to an adult, with the ungainly coordination of a colt; Eskel doesn't know how it got into this part of the countryside, not the usual stomping ground, nor a predictable one with no adults to be whelping anything. Perhaps the result of stolen eggs. That's been a rising problem. Young, unpredictable, hungry. A bad combination, an inevitable kind of combination.

“Well you aren’t getting extra for the bits.” The bits aren't even bleeding anymore, so it's not like they're particularly offensive bits. Eskel didn't even lay them on anything important. They are very nice bits.

“Just want what we agreed on.” He'll keep the bits himself.

“And you got it. Spent it all already?”

Eskel has to have a think about that. “I already got it?”

The alderman looks him up and down. He lingers on the scars, as they do. It’s not noteworthy, except to note how unnoteworthy the lingering is. It’s dull. There will be a day when he doesn’t even notice the dullness of repetition. “You were in a better state about it too, not two hours ago I bet - what, get bashed in the head? Forgetting yourself, witcher?”

Eskel takes the wyvern’s feet with him, the scaled flesh cold in his hands. He nods vaguely. Bashed in the head alright.

“Back for more?” the barkeeper of the inn hands him off a pint when he approaches the woman. That answers that question. They have respected his room - not a lot of folks coming through this part of the land with the whole bit about the wyvern running amock and eating and being generally disruptive of the proceedings of men. “On your room again, witcher? Don't think you can slip out on the tab!”

Eskel drinks it as he ascends the stairs, pretty sure he knows what he’s walking into. Has Yrden crackling in his palm, ready to throw to the floor if it isn’t what he’s expecting.

But it is.

Eskel shoulders into the nook of a room he has, beer foam on his lips, sign ready, braced for it.

Eskel looks up from the little table in the corner, too small for him, knees about his ears with the hunch of the seat.

“Wasn’t expecting a doppler.”

The doppler shoves a piece of bread into its mouth even as it rises. Copied him down to his clothes. Ah, hell, that can be trouble. Don’t need people thinking that witchers are out here multiplying like weeds. People pat themselves on the back about the whole sacking business. Job well done and all. Keeps em comforted in the dead of night until a bigger beastie than a witcher gives them a hard time about existing and then they're scrounging around to find something to kill the something killing them. Endless. Dull. One day, Eskel won’t look at it so hard.

“I didn’t think you’d catch me.”

“You were going to take my coin and run?”

The creature holds up his palms like Eskel’s got the hands of an innocent man. “Tough times.”

It’s the sort of thing Eskel would say.

Eskel lets his sign dissolve. “You chose an interesting face to get ahead with in tough times.”

He takes a step closer, head cocked to inspect the horribly imperfect perfect image of himself. The doppler watches him; Eskel’s face pulls tighter with wariness as Eskel steps within touching range.

The doppler pushes away from the seat, stepping sideways to put the table between them. It his their weight leans, shifting on loose knees. Fighting stance. Eskel wants to laugh but doesn’t. Let’s the creature hover on the edge of the choice.

The doppler twitches an eye at Eskel's would-be laughter bubbled up in his mouth. “Do you find that interesting or are you creeping closer to kill me?”

Dopplers aren’t meant for fighting. They aren’t meant to be wearing a witcher’s skin. Would, could, the reflex to defend and kill stay in that creature so averse to violence? Poor gentle things. Eskel shakes his head. It’s wrong. Poor gentle things. They shouldn’t be shaping his shadow. It doesn’t have swords. Just his clothes. It probably couldn't even pretend to shape silver, to hold a weapon. Nature made them unfit for this world. Eskel touches the sword hilt on his back - the doppler wavers, head ducked, shoulders hunched, looking ready to run. Eskel doesn’t know if he’s ever looked ready to run, not from a fight at least. Only run with someone else’s hand in his - running that never happened. They always chose to fight, stupid as they were. They'd been boys - that was a long time ago - Geralt isn't a boy anymore.

Eskel drops his hand. He isn't a boy either.

“I'm a little tired to be killing tonight.”

He’s never seen any witcher look hesitant like that before. Certainly not himself. Eskel shakes his head, like the picture will align. World’s screwy like that. Fuck, does he really take up that much room? Can’t be enough air in this tight space for two big beasties like himself.

The doppler looks down into the battered pint of ale before it, tilting its his their head. Must be dregs to see by. Wonder what it thinks of all the light those pupils take in. Does it have witcher senses? If only it were that easy. “I don’t think it's a bad face.”

Eskel snorts. He unbuckles his sword straps, lets the leather slither through his hands. A witcher taking off his swords - he means no harm. The doppler can’t miss the signal of peace. “You're the first to say that. Thought your kind was all about beauty and perfection.”

There’s a mess of lore. Depends who’s sourcing it.

The doppler touches its his their face. It his their scars. “What is not beautiful about a thing that survives?”

Now that knocks Eskels socks right off. He sits down on the bed, watching himself watch himself back.

“That it, huh?” He shakes his head again. Gets his boots off. His medallion is silver-silent, useless here, but his hair's soft and at ease on his arms and neck and that’s his own personal instinct at work confirming the peace of the moment. Maybe he can’t fear himself. But dopplers aren’t creatures to fear anyway. He chants it in his head. Poor gentle creatures.

What creature is so low in the world that a witcher looks better than their own reflection. His reflection. Gods above.

“You've survived so much. I might survive in this body.” It’s still looking at itself, himself, themselves, in the pint. Eskel sets his empty one next to it and takes the doppler’s, finishing that too.

“That body holds up to a lot of shit. You've the strength to survive now.” Maybe it can just change the face. Piece something else on. Maybe the doppler can carry that body into the world longer than him.

There now, see, someone will remember him. Someone has known him. Eskel can point at himself and say, yes, I exist. Here I am in perfect replication. An idol, a child, a breathing mirror. The doppler can drag his body through the world until it too succumbs. And then Eskel will die twice. Let death do that; take him twice.

After a moment, the doppler shakes its his their head. “No. I don’t.”

“No, you don’t,” Eskel agrees with a bitter shake of his head. “Better not get cozy looking like that. The next town over will burn you for the difference.”

The doppler, no longer able to consider its his their face, considers its his their hands again, turning them over and over to inspect the calloused and scarred palms and the battered thick knucklebones. The muscles of the face spasm, the cheek and eye trembling like the winds fluttering beneath the skin. He’s hollow, whistling with all that hollow. “Funny.”

“Why’s it funny.”

“To burn a doppler disguised as a witcher who does not pretend to be a man. They burn us for the difference, no matter the difference.”

“Nothing worth pretending about when it's plain as day. The difference.” Eskel helps himself to the food left on the plate, not enough, but it’ll take the edge off. The rough sack of coins from the job is on the nightstand. Good.

He’s sitting down at a table with himself, a creature who has some semblance of his life in its head, who smells like him so much that Eskel can’t even smell it, and he has to order the world by if he got paid just so he can keep on to the next day. There’s an injustice there, or perhaps a wretched sense of humor. It’s not his job to figure it out. He’ll leave that to the great thinkers of the time.

“You know, I see inside your head.”

“Bet it's real pretty in there.”

He almost feels bad for how distressed the doppler sounds, Eskel’s voice strained out in its his their throat with a passion he rarely expresses. “It's horrid.”

Shit. Doppler shoulda known that going into this mess. “Shoulda picked a different head.”

“This one served me. I thought you dead. It took you two days longer than you’d estimated.” Ah, so the creature had been sniffing after him for some time. Picking the ideal chance.

“And you would have worn a dead man's body?”

“A witcher’s body. Some say you’re the walking dead. Revenants. Zombies.”

“You ever seen a zombie?”

“No. I’ve heard the stories.”

Everyone’s heard a story about everything these days. It’s never the right story, the whole story. Eskel looks at his reflection.

“Empty. They're empty.”

They’re barely monsters. They’re worse. He looks away from himself, looks back at it him them.

The doppler shuffles around, going to the bed, sitting, standing, too big in the too small room what with the real Eskel taking up all the space. “You're not empty. You're filled to burst. I think maybe you need a second you just to carry all that you carry.”

“That's a thought. Pack mule for my thoughts. You offering, hm? Suggesting an idea?” Eskel taps his temple then snorts like a gusting horse, dismissing the mad idea. He needs less of himself, not more.

The doppler sits on the edge of the bed, watching Eskel. “I wish I could know what you're thinking. Witchers. Myth even to me as I sit here looking at myth. As I am the myth. Witchers,” the doppler whistles the sound through his teeth, not as high and shrill as Eskel would for his horse, but he knows how the tongue tenses, how the air rises and sings from his lips, how he barely has to move his mouth to whistle like that.

The doppler does not remember having to relearn how to whistle How not to dribble spit down the chin. How to sleep on the back and not let the cheek turn into the pillow, when the wound was closing and the air cool but the ooze dry and burning in the morning, pulling threads from the matted crust of scar and healing.

How godsdamned dry his mouth had been, sucking in air through the gap of his lip. Geralt, changing the dressings. Cool pine needle tea.

The doppler whistles, removed from it all. The memory there and not. 

Eskel's tired. He wants to sleep. He wants a big bath. He wants and wants and wants and there’s a doppler sitting on the bed wearing his face. It’s gonna be a long gods damned night. Harmless creatures. Mischief at most. There’s worse company to greet a witcher in his room. He thinks it’s pretty obvious what he must be thinking. “You don’t know?”

“No. I have guesses.”

“Huh.” Eskel presses the soft crumb of bread into the hard crumb of cheese and drags it all up to his mouth.

“Look at me.” Comes his voice from beside him, a terrible horror if he thinks about it too hard.

“You're awful bossy for a no good doppler riding my ass around town.”

“Now there's a thought.” Cheeky shit. Must have gleaned a sense of humor from him as well. Eskel can feel the snag of its his their gaze on his face. It makes him itch. His medallions silent; he can’t feel a thing. Just a displacement of air off to the side, like there's a shadow beneath the sun, a cool spot in the world.

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Looking at me.”

The doppler tips its his their head. “Is it the first you've looked at yourself?” They both breathe in and out. “Or been looked at so much.”

Eskel sits back in the wooden chair, wood creaking. “I don't think I like you too much.”

The doppler doesn't sound scared this time when it asks, “Will you kill me?”

Eskel wants to laugh. No one listens to him, not even himself. It him them. “Told you I'm tired. Don’t want you causing me another mess to clean up. Or to be robbed.”

“They believed me, when I said I'd killed their problem.”

Figures the one time that the people are grateful and decent, it isn’t even him picking up his reward He shakes his head. “They’re fools. Always bring proof.”

“I remember a time when witches didn’t need so much proof.”

“Horseshit.”

“It's true. Back when people were grateful for your silver swords and did not think of the ore that went into the blades so much as the blood they spilled. Back when we first started to shape your shapes instead of sleeping with our animal others.”

“That makes you awful old.”

“Yes. Yes. It does.” It him them looks at it his their sword hand with curiosity. A tongue over a scar on a palm, sucking at the webbing of a thumb like it he they will draw blood or marrow or a history book from flesh.

“I don't remember my first body.” Longing. “Or many bodies after that. I think I might have been a whelping wolf and curled around a litter to feed them. There’s simplicity in that. Comfort in that. Pack animals.”

Wolf mothers. Of course. Eskel's skin flares up, cells expanding, nerves jumping with the memory of his brothers, here and gone, with well-packed beds of elbows and knees and warmth. Poor gentle things.

“Must have always had bad taste. Thought you were supposed to get more discerning with age.”

“This body is strong, even without the magic I feel on you.” The doppler closes its his their eyes and seems to breathe in the memories spooled out across its his their mind. Stolen memories. Eskel prickles with the thought, ripped open and seen. “This body has seen so much. You've seen so much. Growing older every day. Maybe soon you’ll grow old enough you won’t remember your boyhood days. You think of them so often, they’re,” the doppler runs fingertips across his brow bone, like those flushed sunlight summers are right behind his eyes, “they’re always fresh, even to me.”

Eskel can’t take it anymore. The food in his belly has soured, feels like his guts want to slip out of his skin. “See now,” Eskel rises in his seat, letting the chair clatter away, “don't like looking at you and I really don't like you fingering my memories like that.”

“Ah. Apologies. I know we’re covetous.” The doppler taps its his their temple in mimicry of him.

All Eskel does is swell with the bulk of his strength.”You chose the wrong witcher’s face to wear.”

The creature tilts its his their head. “And who would have been right? Your wolf? I can see him, clear as anything.”

Eskel doesn’t think past getting on the doppler, witcher strength ten times that of the mime in his skin. It’s heavy body but not as heavy as he is. Nothing will ever be him. “You’re supposed to be peaceful creatures. Stop taunting me."

Eskel takes the doppler by its his their shoulders, forcing the creature into the wall. Maybe on some men, the sight of themselves would stay their hand, but not on Eskel. Does a bit of the opposite on him.

“Ah, I do not like bloodshed, it makes my heart hurt.”

“You're making me want a little bloodshed.”

“So little love for yourself you'd wound your own image?”

“It's a wounded image to begin with. What’s another scar among so many?”

“Is that all you have to offer yourself?” He watches the twist of his eyebrows, notes how the one can’t move into motion as well, lays crumpled above his right eye where the muscle had died - and though Eskel grips his doppler self, he does nothing to protect the nearing of his mirrored face, watching his scars grow larger in a slow loom. The doppler brings his lips to Eskels and kisses him, a passing thing, an entreaty. Frightened instinct makes him throw the doppler to the ground, Eskel’s hands strikingly heavy in what they lack.

Eskel watches his own body turn over, the way fear opens his face pathetically. His hands lift to shield a kick that won’t come. He watches his own eyes, the fire lacquer of them, search up in supplication and curiosity.

The back of his neck prickles at the sight. He sneers at the doppler wearing his face, his body, and letting it be cowed. It makes him - gods damn that creature, Eskel wants to strike it for _looking_ at him like that. For looking _like that_ at all.

Lacking sufficient words, Eskel growls, a rank sound ripped around his teeth, his fangs, the same fangs made docile in that kissing other’d mouth. The doppler has his heavy body but not of the force behind it, and Eskel heaves the creature from the floor to push the doppler stumbling to bed.

“What do you think a Witcher can offer himself? There enough memory in my head for you to make a good guess?”

They grip each other, hands on biceps. The doppler flits yellow eyes back and forth, the black slit of a pupil pooling wide before snapping razor thin again, probably giving himself a headache. But it’s the shock of a realization, of a mount of alarm.

“A swift end.”

“Aye, a swift end,” Eskel echoes, shaking the creature roughly. “A scrap of dignity and a swift end.”

“Is that all, Eskel?”

The shock of his own name out of his mouth loosens his hands on the doppler. The creature does not mirror the action. The reflection ripples in front of him; it smooths. It clarifies, blurs, clarifies again. He curls away, or tries, but cannot, witcher strength weak against itself. The doppler heaves - the scars thin, fade, vanish - a younger man looks at him. A man from a summertime.

“Huh,” Eskel acknowledges, forcibly blank. Then the face is his as it is again, in a blink. The doppler blinks wetted eyes, shivering against him, a heavy mass in his arms. All the pretend has left it. Eskel has to hold the creature up, puppet and string and shadowbox.

“So swift, and so little, what you offer.” It laughs in his voice, his shy and crumbled laugh of condescension. “I’m not sure my body likes your body.”

“Rude to say now,” Eskel allows, sitting the doppler down on the edge of the bed, unnerved but without the anger that’d taken him just prior.

“There is beauty in survival. We, the rare species.” He suddenly has an armful of himself, the doppler pressing the puckered flesh of its his their right cheek to his, rubbing the tormented skin together. It must feel the dull throb in its his their eye as he does, the muscle tired of holding itself up. The wound, just a smidge more to the side - if Geralt had not tended the infection - his eye would have gone and slid free or rotted. Ah, the lack of peripheral would have killed him one day.

“Your head is horrible,” the doppler says, shuddering a little. “It hurts to look at all the things you float atop.”

“Told you you could have picked a better face to wear.”

“We need to survive. You survive.”

That he does. And so too does this pathetic lonely creature. He pushes the doppler back from him finally and holds it him them to the bed, patting down the sides of mimicked clothes for anything of his, of value. Nothing. Just a scamp catching a meal and a bed as any desperate thing would. Searching for something, someone, even a witcher, for a little kindness.

He has to wonder, as is natural, if his brothers have ever experienced the conundrum of facing down themselves. Eskel shakes his head and makes a note to himself to ask when he can.

“Enough now,” Eskel tells the doppler, patting its his their massive shoulder. “I’m damned tired.”

The creature only stares at him, purposefully uncomprehending. Eskel gives it a shake, then, gripping its neck, drags it from the bed.

“You would not even share a bed with yourself?”

“No. Guess not.”

The creature grips his leg, hand curled around his calf. “No?” It tilts its his their head, and Eskel has to wonder if he’s ever looked like such an eager dog baiting a kick to the ribs. He can think the creature as a creature, but sure as the moon in the sky outside the window just there, that’s his face staring up at him, an enticing lift to his brows, his shoulders sloped so wide and durable.

Eskel draws himself forward, considering with a long breath. He plants his elbows on his knees - the doppler rocks back on its behind, posturing lazily, meeting his stare.

“This your game?” Eskel guesses.

“No games. Just a little kindness.”

Eskel barks out a laugh. “Strange times for us creatures, then, playing kindly.”

“Strange times all around, and kindness sparser still.”

It’s not the weirdest thing he’s done. Not the most foolish. In fact, it does strike him as a perverse and curious treat. Is it the highest form of indulgence and idolatry, or the lowest debasement of the self?

“Bet you beat a lonely wank.”

The creature looks down between its his their legs, looks at the space occupied by a cock and balls, then at the spread of Eskel’s real and true thighs, the apex offering. Fuck. Eskel drags a hand down his face, smelling the woods and dirt on his skin, the leather of his hilt, horse, blood, human trafficked spaces around the whirls of his fingertips. Fuck.

“C’mere.”

He sits back on the bed, opens his legs. Fuck. To hell with it. He might not ask his brothers at all.

“Shit, wonder if--” he starts to make the sign of Axii, but the dark pupil overtaking his reflected eyes stops him. They both stop, neither form of Eskel moving, not even breathing. In the stillness of the room, all Eskel can hear, as true as that damn moon, is that equal-tempoed heartbeat falling into perfect sync with his. It’s not like Geralt’s, which might beat at his pace but never quite so evenly with him, nor Lambert’s which always runs just a step faster, the littlest among them still running in angry fits. No. This is a chamber upturned over itself, a vacuum space just theirs. Four square walls. A roof. One beating heart and a strange reflection clearer than a lake has ever showed him.

The doppler lights up in anticipation of the hand that takes hold of his shaggy hair. Eskel draws it high onto its knees, watching the way he’d look just like that. The strain of his own neck, the heavy looseness of his limbs when pulled into the taut thread of submission. Eskel drags himself to himself - they tilt their heads in tandem, the doppler tracking the witcher with matched eyes. The angle of the chin, the fitting of mouths. Eskel squeezes his eyes shut and runs the tip of his tongue over the scars on his lip that keep his mouth snagged like a fish, that prematurely gutted hook of his smile. It is not as terrible as he thinks it would be. The skin pockets and lets him lick over the revealed tip of his canine. The sharpness is pleasant.

The doppler bites him.

Eskel grunts, pulling the creature from his tongue. There’s a little smile on the face, it his their face, coy and strange. He has never seen himself look like that.

In fact, he hasn’t a clue what he looks like smiling. He supposes then, that this is it. This is his smile.

“Oh, that’s weird,” he acknowledges, because the moment must be acknowledged.

The doppler laughs, booming now, his wide drunken laugh, the one that trembles his jowl and hurts and can’t last too long, the one that Geralt ribs him over, and presses in as he would press, a copycat slink of movement to kiss him firmly on the mouth. He thinks this is how he kissed a blacksmith months and months ago - no it was years, wasn’t it - she had square and steady hands and held his gaze unflinching and Eskel had kissed her without a hint of shyness as she deserved more than his deprecating bashful play. She had wanted to be fucked and so he had fucked her thoroughly. Sami. She had hot pink scars on her forearms and she didn’t react to the still glowing flecks of wood ash that jumped from the fire they’d made in her home.

“You liked her.”

And then the doppler presses him into the bed, sudden and heavy, he has a heavy body, and kisses him on the neck - Eskel knows a kiss that hungry and open will pull on his face, he can feel the tightness like a sunburn - this is how he kisses-

“You kiss _him_ like an animal.”

Eskel gets a knee over the doppler and rolls them. The bed is too small. They both fall, hitting the ground. Eskel keeps the creature on its back.

“He’s beautiful.” It can summon his wolf in the mind’s eye shared between them.

“Wouldn’t try these tricks on him if you ever met him.”

There’s a preening stretch in the creature. It rolls his eyes, tilts his mouth up in a proud smirk.

Does he ever look like that?

“ _You_ like it.” It tries to rise. Eskel chokes himself without hesitation. Hopes he never gasps like that, all shocky and wild. The eyes roll like a spooked horse - his body tries to shrink and cannot. Eskel isn’t a thing made for shrinking. The doppler learns that fast, sprawled beneath him, too big to hide. It chose the wrong body.

“Haven’t decided that yet.”

He wants to know if the creature can access his magic, but that wouldn’t be fair of the world would it? Is the only hobbling of a doppler its aversion to pain and suffering? The gut animal revulsion to blood like the most docile and frightened of creatures. Strange things. Mimics. Empty but for mimicry.

This must please the doppler, to play mimic with itself. Two puppets on the same string. Eskel gentles his hand and pets down his chest, pressing his palm to that stolen witcher heart. He was never able to bend himself to cruelty. A rough hand, a deadly hand, yes, but not to torment.

He kisses the doppler, holding it to the creaking wood floor. He kisses it newly, as he has not kissed another creature because he has never kissed himself and never will again. He has never been kissed as himself. He holds his face as it has never been held before and kisses his lips for the first time, the shred of his cheek, the hook of his nose, the unkept edge of his dark brow.

“There it is, for us,” the doppler sighs, wrapping its his their arms around Eskel’s shoulders in an embrace, crooning a purr low in its throat. Eskel rumbles a matched sound.

He doesn’t ask what's there. He prickles with knowing. Something swift, something kind.

“Like this,” Eskel asks, clearing his throat but unwilling to move away from the heat of his own body. The edges of their growing erections slide together, the thin pants the doppler’s wearing reveal the shape more easily than his sturdy leather breeches, “do you like the things I like?”

And though the question seems plain and clear, Eskel scrapes his teeth over the stubbled cleft of his own jaw in an offering of insight.

There’s a hand, his hand, in his hair. “We are a collection of pleasured places.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“We like what you like, and then some.”

Even in his own mind, he does not know if he’s trying to love the wretched doppler or to love himself. But he lifts them both from the floor and tumbles them back to bed, pulling his clothes off without ceremony. The doppler echoes the movement until Eskel and Eskel press nakedly together.

He keeps his eyes closed, not quite ready to look at himself like the doppler was offering. But gods, he doesn’t need his eyes to be finding the body beneath himself. He’s been nose blind to anything but rot and sweat and gore for years, poison brew blood, but now - Eskel mounts his own hips, pins his own wrists, and stuffs his face shamelessly into the crook of his neck to heave a breath of his skin like a woodfire catching light. The fucking doppler smells like a potion’s been broken over him, like hot glass still glowing with reshaping. Sun-white sand and skin.

  
He thought he’d smell like mud or death. Or just sweat and animal.

There’s a scorch in his nose with each sniff he takes, nostrils dilating under the force.

“Weird,” he repeats to himself, to himself and only himself because that’s all there is in this bed. Himself and himself and a creature who purrs like a shadow crept out from under the bed. Eskel licks a taut tendon in its his their neck. Now that - that tastes like sweat and animal. Skin taste. Body taste. Normal. Stunningly normal.

It’s a new angle, but that’s his cock in his hand as it ever is. The doppler arches, caught off guard, and Eskel holds him tight with a thumb under the head, rubbing the foreskin back and forth like he’s gonna wear a hole in himself.

“Ain’t I sweet,” he rumbles, looking down at himself. Touches his own nipple gone hard and tight and - can feel the sensation on himself, knows how that must feel but he can never do it as good to himself as when he’s got someone willing to twist the nerves of his skin. It’s idle touch, time-biding. Eskel watches his body thrum, nonsense foreplay with himself. Winding up to something big and remarkable if he let it.

The doppler looks at Eskel’s hand on its his their cock then up at Eskel, brow drawn, scars flaring bright with the bloodrush.

“What’s that feel like?” Eskel asks, giving it his their cock a long slow pull, webbing his fingers out around the peak of himself and massaging the pink head peeping out.

“Shit, am I that pink down there?” Eskel laughs to himself, themselves, and the other Eskel huffs too, whether a laugh or a bolt of sensation, it’s not clear, not with Eskel guiding the glistening tight foreskin over the swelled up shape of his cock, urging the doppler to full hardness. He cradles the cock, his cock, in his hand, admiring. That’s a damn fine cock even from another angle.

“Good,” the doppler says, laying back, raising a knee up to slide Eskel forward on his hips. It’s a stretch, like sitting in the saddle. No wonder people got so fed up riding him. The cradle of him is deep, something good to ride and get lost in. He'll have to remember that. Eskel sinks his weight against his own body, curiosity thinning as the comfort of flesh rises.

“You have a different body you like? You wanna be?”

“We’re this,” the doppler answers, pushing up onto elbows and meeting his face in another entreating kiss. “We like this.”

“We do, huh?”

“We do.”

“Alright then.” Eskel looks at himself, swears to anything he can see his own face reflected in his own eyes; that’s a sight to keep buried deep within himself; he makes up his mind. He kisses himself, the doppler, because that’s warmth and that’s good. And no sense pretending he’s squeamish for the sake of no one else’s opinion. He might tell his brothers afterall. Maybe they’ll be jealous. Might get a kick out of it.

He doesn’t have it in him for anything else but kissing, even being hard is an afterthought, a reaction more than anything he’s stoking but the doppler - Eskel strokes it his their cock in his hand, kissing his snarled mouth with considerate determination. Them two, the poor lonely creatures of the world. The doppler keeps a hand on the back of his neck, holding on carefully, bucking and squirming eagerly. What is pleasure to a doppler. Did it think of Sami and her steady hands; did it think of Geralt and his arching back? That sweetly obnoxious bard? The random paid women? Did it touch it him them and think of itself or remember itself back through the traces of Eskel’s memory, the surface coating of sex.

Eskel blinks himself to a distance, looking at his own damn flushed face and the puffing of his chest, his lips, the pulse of a vein under his thumb and the way the skin nips into itself.

The doppler cranes up, drowsy and seeking, kissing at Eskel’s chin. “More?” it asks for in his voice, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. “Touch us more, Eskel.”

It he they look at him, Eskel, looking at him with a soft mouth of expectation, the tense body of pleasure wound up in the middle of a fight. All of it knocks something out of Eskel, to look and be looked at.

“Hey now,” he mulls, settling across the doppler snugly, bracketing the harsh line of the body's hips. “If I'm Eskel, what are you?”

Th doppler shrugs, gives Eskel a shy twitch of a smile, one that sets the muscle of his cheek and eyelid trembling, his mouth revealing fangs and forgetmenots. “Eskel.”

“You're Eskel too?” Eskel twists his wrist, strokes down too tight on the cock in his hands, knows how it feels - the throb and twitch, the blood pounding fiercely in the veins so they bite back into his palm - sweet Melitele, the feel of himself. A man can enjoy his own cock, can't he? Pride glows over his skin in a hot flush.

“We're Eskel.”

Eskel hums and tuts his tongue, reaching up for that stubbled square jaw, thumb right into the well-known nook of a scar, like a knife went for him.

It'd been a kitchen knife. It'd been a widow. So many goddamn widows. What comes after the monsters. Survivors. Scars.

“You're not claiming any other name?”

A shake of the head. Eskel nods his own then nods its his their head with him. The whole thing makes him laugh, and then the doppler laughs too, pulling Eskel down into a hungry kiss. Starved. The creature is starved. Gods, he's hungry too.

“You be Eskel,” Eskel tells the doppler. “Melitele knows I've been Eskel long enough. Been Eskel enough for a lifetime. Give me a little break. You be Eskel the Witcher.”

“And you?”

“Eh. Just call me...Wolf, how about?” Nice an easy. Nameless. A man of pack. A surviving thing. Let the Doppler have the wolf pack back, so many bodies ago; let Eskel have his brotherhood back, the easy slide of belonging with something many’d and howling.

The doppler - Eskel - holds it's his their nose to his, the Wolf’s, it his their cheek. They breathe in. They breathe in.

“Wolf, like him?”

His vital organs clench and squirm and rebel and rejoice. “Just like him.”

It him they. All that repetition.

Eskel never went in for the loquacious sort, never presumed his voice to boom out past the necessary hark and hack of battle. But this Eskel, he throws it his their head back, arching up into the sure knowing hands of a well trained mutt, asking for more.

“Touch us. Feel good with us, Wolf.” This Eskel is not trained out of asking for what it he they wants.

“Hey now, Eskel, looking pretty like that,” The Wolf teases, teases a finger into himself. His wrist is already tensed up with the angle, reached down between the mess of their bodies, the hug of groins and sweaty skin - they're rubbed up together with no intention of stopping. “I'm working on that. Good plan you got. Right there with you. Let's feel good, hmm?”

And he's tired. He is. The doppler had been right, it took him two days longer because he’d had such a slow go of returning from the fight. He's hard but purposelessly so. He's on the better end of a batch of potions but just cause the bloods pumping the right direction doesn't mean anythings going to happen. No pretty explosions tonight. But. But. It's nice to touch. It's nice touching - and Eskel, well, Eskel's wiggling in bed on the end of his fingers like he's coming alive; Eskel is stroking his own cock, sighing with it, neck going taut then loose with the catch-release of huge gusting breaths. The peak of a fang in that crooked mouth has become pearl and temptation.

The Wolf stares down at Eskel. Yellow eyes meet yellow eyes.

“Are you going to make us come?” Eskel asks.

“Maybe.”

Eskel tosses his head back and forth on the pillow, relishing the denial, whining with it - so unlike himself. It’s not him. The Wolf kisses the exposed throat.

“Be kind. Be merciful. Let us come.”

“You robbed me.” The Wolf slips his fingers out to rub that clenching hungry hole before pressing back in - out again. In. It’s not wet. It’s not slick. This body can take it. Eskel grunts with each thrust, pushing down onto the friction, the filling ache. “But I’m not stopping you. Go ahead, Eskel. You can come.”

The doppler shudders with the name, mouth falling open, eyes squeezing shut.

“Again,” it he they plead.

The Wolf licks his lips. “Come, Eskel. Come for us." His lips drag and slur with spit and skin and promise.

He wants to watch. He wants to devour. It tears through him. He needs more of himself. He needs many of himself. He just wants to watch - the hitch of the breath, the sudden stillness, then the jerking tremble of his body. Eskel groans through his teeth, cock throbbing in the Wolf’s grip, body squeezing down, hips rutting needily on fingers, tiny little grinding motions to drag out the orgasm.

It’s not pretty. It ain’t like when Geralt’s little bard comes, all high noises and pink tongue and blushing cheeks. Eskel groans from the belly, too big, too full on pleasure. Too much. His body fights with it, flexing, sweating. Then the chords are cut; the thighs fall open. The muscles go limp.

The Wolf licks him clean, grunting at his own taste, tastes he’s had before. Not like this. Not the dribbling silk hot head of his own cock bobbing in the last reflexes of pleasure. He doesn’t know if he wants to slap the pleasure on Eskel’s face watching him or kiss it. To pet the scarred cheek or turn his eyes away.

He blows out the candle and settles around the shape of himself. Something about whelping, and litter mates, and animal contact. Something about instinct and need.

“You’re a lonely creature,” one Eskel says to another. The other Eskel holds tight and tighter. Elbows and knees and a hard shuddering breath that catches and releases, snagged on itself in chambered echoes.

But they are not alone, not tonight.

Eskel hugs the shape of himself, loving himself gently in the dark where he cannot see except the shadow of a man a creature a wolf a surviving thing. The repetition of another day. But tonight, it is sound sleep and skin.

* * *


End file.
